


props and mayhem

by ayendae



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Based on a Pierce the Veil Song, Depression, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Music, several pierce the veil songs actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-16 10:17:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21506257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayendae/pseuds/ayendae
Summary: Taking walks is about the only time that Lucas ever gets any thinking in, especially since he moved.Based very (VERY) loosely off of personal experiences, and more heavily based off the Pierce the Veil music I've been immersing myself in.SHIPS: Lucas/Max, Lucas/sad music that my parents don't like, Lucas/walks
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	props and mayhem

**Author's Note:**

> iTs NoT jUst A pHaSe MoM

They were sitting in the parking lot, the overhead light casting a cold, white glow around them. Not too far away, a football game was in progress, the crowd alternating cheering and groaning.

“Here,” the girl said, handing him a bottle. Lucas took it, turning it over so he could read the label. Beer, it said.

The others were already uncapping their bottles, taking sips, some of them coughing in disgust and some of them grimacing but swallowing more. Lucas only stared at his.

“Go on,” the girl said. Lucas glanced up and nodded, unscrewing the cap, and put it to his mouth.

A flash of red. His memory illuminated a face for a moment, remembered a pair of oddly bright, grey-green-blue eyes, framed in with flaming hair.

Lucas set the bottle back down again. His stomach felt sick.

“What’s the matter?” the girl asked him. The others had put down their bottles as well, and were watching him curiously.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t do it. Just can’t,” Lucas said. Then he put the cap back on the beer, stood up. “I gotta go, you guys.”

“Got a hot date?” the girl asked him, smiling. Lucas shouldered his backpack and shrugged. “Maybe.”

“If it doesn’t go well, hook me up with her!” she called after him. Lucas waved at her over his shoulder and walked off into the night.

The night air was cold and dry, biting at him despite the jacket he had brought. In his backpack, his notebook and a few pencils clacked with his steps. The football game sounds behind him soon faded out, replaced by the sound of the town and the passing cars. It was still busy here. Ahead of him, a car pulled away from a gas station, mumble rap pounding out of the windows. Lucas grimaced, wishing he’d brought earbuds.

His phone dinged. _You okay?_ the girl asked him. Lucas looked at it for a moment, then shut off his phone and put it back in his pocket.

7:43 PM, said the clock on the convenience store ahead of him.

Lucas shivered, dipping his hands deeper into his pockets.

“Hi,” someone said. Lucas looked up to see three girls smiling at him, not much older than he was. He managed a wave and a half-smile, not really sure what to say, and kept walking. One of them called something to him, but he didn’t hear and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He heard their laughter recede into the background.

Ahead of him was a fast food restaurant. Lucas walked past it and stopped, looking at the windows and the parked cars and the drive-thru, fingering his wallet. His father had given him a few dollars for a hot dog at the game, but seeing as he wasn’t at the game anymore, it was probably fine to spend it however he wanted.

He sat on the outside chairs, chewing his hamburger slowly. It tasted better alone, he thought to himself. Buying a hamburger past dark alone was nice. Lucas looked at his hamburger, his appetite vanishing, and then ate the rest of it in two inhalations. A car drove up, and the three girls from before got out. Lucas watched them cautiously from under his hat, crumpling the greasy paper in his hands. One of them noticed him, and waved. Lucas did not wave back, and stood up before they could come any closer, tossing the wax paper in the trash and walking off down the street. His soda made his hands colder, but he didn’t care.

The buildings around him eventually faded out, replaced by suburban sprawl, lit only by the streetlights, the beams of passing cars, and the living room lamps of strangers through the windows. Lucas walked slower now, letting the darkness press around him, listening to the crickets creaking at him from the trees.

“Back so soon?” his mother asked him when he walked inside.

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “It…ended early.”

“Oh,” she said. Lucas walked into his room and closed the door.

Still fully clothed, he lay facing the ceiling with the lights off. The girl texted him again, but he turned the phone over and ignored it.

He thought about the girl, and what the older girl may or may not have called to his back.

He thought about the beer. And he thought about a pair of grey-green-blue eyes, now bright, now flickering and twirling with alcoholic frenzy, red hair swirling crazily around her. He thought about her face, pale and freckled and beautiful, twisted and contorted in a sneer that made her look like her brother, spitting drunken poison at him. He thought about a rainy night, driving past her house with boxes in the trailer behind him, thinking about asking his father to stop the car, thinking _she won’t care, she doesn’t care._

He thought about where she might be now, who she might be with, what she might be doing.

And mostly, Lucas Sinclair thought about how beautiful and oh-so-fucked-up Max Mayfield was, and how her eyes had looked when she smiled at him.

His stomach clenched. Lucas rolled over and watched the sky outside the window lighten slowly.

==

Lucas had lived in The Middle of Nowhere, Indiana, for almost his entire life, and his best friends in the world had been Mike Wheeler, Jane “El” Hopper, Dustin Henderson, and Will Byers.

And Max Mayfield.

Max didn’t really fit in with the party, per se. Lucas and the others were nerds, preferring to sit in Mike’s basement and play video games, or argue about complicated movie theories, or discuss politics and science. Max was different, alien to their world of Minecraft and Reddit and Marvel movies and Dungeons and Dragons.

For one, she drank. A lot. She might have been fifteen, but she drank enough to give a sailor a stomachache.

She smoked cigarettes as well. El’s own father had to take her to the station once when she’d been caught trying to shoplift cigarettes from the store. Lucas had asked her why she smoked once, and she’d blown the mist at him nonchalantly and said “Because if I don’t smoke, I drink. And if I don’t drink, I cut.” Her wrists were crisscrossed, tattooed with nightmares written forever in red.

_(i have a million different girls that hide under my bed and when i let them out, they treat me right. oh, what a waste of perfectly good, clean wrist)_

One night, she’d called him, her voice quiet and shaking, asking him to come over.

“Are you okay?” Lucas asked her, already putting on his coat.

“No,” she’d said. “No.”

He found her sitting in the yard, as if waiting for him, the moonlight making her hair look almost blonde.

“Hey,” she’d said. A single red teardrop fell from her sleeve.

“Hey,” Lucas said. He took her home with him, and he bandaged her arms and held her when she cried.

_(i kind of like the way you tell me “baby, please come home. i need you here right now. i’m crying underwater so you don’t hear the sound”)_

She’d stopped cutting. And smoking and drinking. Lucas made her promise; made her promise she’d talk to him instead of going back to what numbed her.

“Fine,” she’d said. “For you.”

And then, two weeks later, he’d found her with a bottle of beer, her wrists screaming _I wish I was dead._

“Friends don’t lie!” he’d told her. Max had laughed drunkenly at him, sneering.

She looked like her brother when she did that.

Max had called him the next day. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.” It wasn’t.

“I won’t do it again.” She would.

Another three weeks. And then—

_(sick and tired of walking up into burning eyes and cigarettes)_

“I can’t!” Lucas said, throwing his arms up. “I can’t do this, Max! I can’t keep killing myself every single day over you, I can’t keep—” his voice had broken here, just like his soul and his brain and his heart, and shattered.

_(oh, can you feel it? you’re feeding on my restless soul)_

Max had only sniffled. “I hate you,” she whispered.

“Fine, hate me,” Lucas said. “Because you apparently don’t realize that I’ve been trying to _help_ , because I’m _in love with you!”_

He left before she could say anything else.

_(my love for you was bulletproof but you’re the one who shot me)_

The next day, his father had been transferred to another town.

So they’d driven by Max’s house in the rain. Lucas had thought about stopping the car, asking his father to hold on so he could tell Max and say goodbye.

He hadn’t said anything, and they drove away.

_(we fell in love and now we’re both alone)_

It had been two months since that day, and she hadn’t even bothered to text him. The others texted him regularly on the group chat, but Max was never there. When Lucas asked about her, the others dodged around the question.

Then he heard from Will that Max had moved back to California. _We had a little goodbye gathering for her,_ Will said. _Gave her a D &D figurine and told her to keep in touch._

 _Has she?_ Lucas asked.

_No. we think she either got in trouble again or she just doesn’t want to_

Or she’s dead, Lucas thought to himself.

Steve Harrington, a college student who was on the group chat because he was somehow friends with Dustin, said that the last time he’d seen Max, she’d had a black eye.

Once he looked her up on Instagram, to check in. She posted photos fairly regularly, but so far there had been none since three weeks ago. He found selfies of her and his mouth screwed up.

He’d forgotten how pretty she was.

Lucas closed his laptop with a _snap,_ blinking away the sea water the rose to his eyes.

_(you died in california by the sulfur and the sea. i guess i never should have loved you, but i do forever because you loved me)_

“Where are you off to?”

“Don’t know,” Lucas said, zipping up his jacket, and then closed the front door behind him.

The air was chill and crisp, and smelled of smoke, pine, and decaying oak trees. Leaves whispered along the pavement, crackling under his shoes when he stepped on them.

By now Lucas knew the neighborhood well enough to find his way around, and followed his usual path to school. The school parking lot was entirely empty, and he walked through it, enjoying the emptiness of the large space.

The football field was deserted as well, a few red cups and cigarettes scattered around from the last party. The girl had asked Lucas if he wanted to go, but Lucas said no.

If she had been Max, he might have gone. But Max didn’t like parties.

She probably only would have gone for the beer, Lucas thought to himself, and his mouth twisted in a half-sarcastic, half-miserable curve. He sat in the bleachers, kicking a solo cup and watching it skitter down the bench before dropping and falling into the grass.

_(you barely started drinking but your beauty never stopped you)_

The sun flickered as the clouds hurried past it, the grass rippling under the breeze and debris, and Lucas sat with his earbuds stuffed as far into his skull as they could possibly go.

His phone dings at him, and he lets himself feel hopeful that maybe it’s Max texting him, but no, just the girl sending him a weird picture of a cat. _Lol,_ he types back, not even trying, and puts his phone back in his pocket.

It’s time he walked home anyway.

==

Sometimes Lucas liked to pretend that Max could see and hear through him—a scientific impossibility, but something to indulge in nonetheless. He imagined what she might think of the music he’d been listening to-- _sounds like you’re finally agreeing that screamo is an acceptable genre of music, Stalker--_ or what she’d say about his surroundings-- _wow, New England is different from California. Is it always this quiet? And why the hell is it so cold?--_ or how she might react to something he’s experiencing-- _all your new friends are kind of bitches. And that’s coming from a bitch._ It makes him smile, sometimes, thinking about her snarky responses to just about everything.

An example. While he’d been wandering around a forest-lined street with the fall leaves crunching under his feet and the smell of winter just starting to creep up on him, he thought about what she’d say about the trees. _Kind of a wimpy forest compared to…what did you nerds call it? Mirkwood? That’s a Lord of the Rings thing, isn’t it? You guys are such dorks._

You play 80s arcade games, Lucas would respond, elbowing her.

_Having good taste does not a nerd make._

Yeah, but good taste is a relative measure. See, you think it’s good, but to somebody like Troy, it’d be dorky.

_Well, that’s because Troy has, like, two brain cells. If even that much._

He’d elbow her again and laugh, because she’d be right about that. And she might elbow him back, trying to glare.

She could be amazing, when she wasn’t drunk.

Lucas wondered how drunk she was now.

According to Will, she’d texted them sporadically, sending them messages at odd times. He sent screenshots.

 _How’s Lucas?_ she’d asked once.

Lucas thought bitterly that she could have just texted him herself.

 _Billy_ was all she had said once, before going silent for a week.

She’d never said explicitly, but Lucas knew what Billy did to her when their “parents” weren’t around.

The wind exhaled the smell of snow, snapping him out of his reverie. He leaned into it, closing his eyes.

==

His phone dinged.

Lucas looked up from his homework at the lit screen, wondering vaguely if he should pick it up.

Maybe it’s Max, he thought, and smiled wryly. A joke, by this point.

He scribbled the answer to his last math problem, picking up the phone and looking at the screen.

_been a while, stalker._

Another ding.

_just so you know, i miss you_

Lucas stares at it for a moment longer, then opens his phone. 


End file.
